Pop CD

A Perfect Circle, Emotive

Deliberately released on America's election day, A Perfect Circle's third album mostly comprises reworkings of familiar songs, alongside a couple of the band's own pieces designed to chime with the overall concept of "songs about war, peace, love and greed". The predominant mood is brooding and threatening, like vast storm clouds massing, with the exception of the touching a cappella version of Joni Mitchell's The Fiddle and the Drum, which closes the disc. The opener, by contrast, is a spine-chilling revamp of Crucifix's Annihilation, intoned in an apocalyptic whisper by vocalist Maynard James Keenan. Cover versions are often hobbled by the artist's inability to step outside the original and find a fresh perspective, but some of these treatments verge on the visionary. Lennon's Imagine has been turned into a death-march, and When the Levee Breaks retains only vestigial traces of the original Led Zeppelin groove. Gripping, if somewhat morbid.